Time Crisis Mobile

Time Crisis Mobile – Can you kill everyone on the screen within the shortest time?

Time Crisis has been a very popular game in the arcades and translated well to games consoles with the availability of using movement sensitive ‘guns’. It stands to reason then that putting this title onto your mobile phone seems a very tall order.

I’m happy to report that Namco have managed to select all the main elements of the game. Of course there’s sadly no option to move your gun and imitate Dirty Harry, but the controls are pretty effective and responsive. By tapping the OK key you come out of hiding and can take aim at any of the armed assailants. Pressing the OK key again and you’ll go back into hiding and can reload your weapon again. The screen’s broken down into a 3x3 grid of squares which equates to the appropriate key on the keypad. So for example, if a gunman is in the top middle square, by pressing 2 on the keypad, you’ll end up taking them out.

Some opponents are tougher than others and will require you to hit them several times before they are eliminated. This poses quite a risk to you as the longer you’re out in the open, the more exposed you are to the enemy’s bullets and rockets. The flipside to this is you can’t progress until each stage is clear and by being hidden may mean you live longer, your time will deplete and before long, you’ll be not just be fighting the enemy but the clock as well... and even the most talented shooters out there will be forced to recognise, time will always win!

There are two modes for you to enjoy, Story mode and Crisis Mission – but you can only access the latter once you’ve unlocked the missions by completing the stages in Story mode. On the plus side, you have quite an extensive range of options to choose from in the menu so you can make the game harder or easier to suit as well as you can tinker with whether or not you wish to use the grid view to hit your targets or rather the d-pad in a semi-automatic setting. The advantage of this I found was you could shoot quite fast but when ducking in and out of cover to take your shots, your crosshairs would be widely off mark and you could easily end up losing a life or two taking aim.

Ultimately, this is a really enjoyable shooter style game and definitely comes close to the much loved original version.

Rating 79%

Positives

Plenty of options to make the game suit your taste and difficulty

Lots of firepower and action

Good graphics

Negatives

Quite difficult

Controls are a little strange to get used to

The ‘recoil’ of pressing the trigger is missing